Curated by Lara Pan

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Franck Vigroux and Antoine Schmitt’s Tempest

February 1st & 3rd @ 7 PM

Just after the big bang, the universe was completely shapeless, filled with matter and energy, but irregularities were born, which became atoms, suns and planets…
Within the primitive soup on Earth, indistinct molecules started to group as bacterias, to become life, animals, humans…

Tempest recreates the sound and fury of these original maelstroms within which it searches for the origin of form. As an audio and visual performance, Tempest associates the analog instruments of Franck Vigroux with the visual algorithms of Antoine Schmitt, to create a real system-universes of pure chaos, that can be seen in the movements of millions of particles and can be heard through the roaring of air. By manipulating the internal forces of this chaos, the performers give birth to audio and visual shapes that develop in time, with more or less stability, more or less evidence.

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Franck Vigroux and Kurt d’Haeseleer’s Centaure

February 2nd @ 7 PM

Centaure is a postdigital road trip to a dystopic future. It’s a virtual ‘safari’ to a world populated by cloned creatures and mutations of species that seem to have been artificially rebuilt from contaminated DNA. Man has disappeared, absorbed by technology, which has become anthropomorphic. Everything breathes, smells, rot, transforms … The grass, the trees, the water, the clouds, everything is contaminated with a barely visible, but omnipresent technology. Human flesh has exploded and has morphed with machines to give birth to a perverted new nature.

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A composer and improviser, Franck Vigroux lives in a universe where noise, improvisation, electroacoustic, industrial, hörspiel, and contemporary music meet. On stage he can play many different roles: guitar player, turntablist, revox manipulator, electronic performer. He also directed numerous videos, such as Dust (30′) in 2007. Franck Vigroux performs solo, but he also regularly collaborates for live acts with Mika Vainio, Transistor (with Ben Miller), Reinhold Friedl, as well as with with Kasper Toeplitz, Elliott Sharp, Zeena Parkins, Joey Baron, Bruno Chevillon, Marc Ducret, Push the triangle, Kenji Siratori, Ars Nova ensemble instrumental, and performs with video artists Antoine Schmitt (on Tempest), Kurt d’Haeseleer (on Aucun lieu), Philippe Fontes (on Police). Since 2000 he has repeatedly performed in the United States, in Europe and in Japan either in festivals or in clubs. In 2003, he founded his own label D’Autres Cordes records. In 2008 he founded the Compagny D’autres Cordes dedicated to performing arts.

Antoine Schmitt is an installation artist who creates artworks in the form of objects, installations or situations : dynamic systems, of minimalist aesthetics, to address the notion of programmed movement, as shape and as point of view. Originally a programming engineer in human computer interactions and artificial intelligence, he places the program, a radically new material in art history due to its essence of active matter, at the core of most of his artworks.
Alone or through collaborations, he has has confronted this approach with more established artistic fields like music, dance, architecture, literature or cinema, of which he revisits the codes. As theoretician, speaker and editor of the gratin.org portal, Antoine Schmitt explores the field of programmed art.  His work has received several awards in international festivals : transmediale (Berlin, second prize 2007, honorary 2001), Ars Electronica (Linz, second prize 2009), UNESCO International Festival of Video-Dance (Paris, first prize online 2002), Digital Turku (Turku, FI, honorary, 2011), Vida 5.0 (Madrid, honorary 2002), CYNETart (Dresden, honorary 2004), medi@terra (Athens, first prize 1999), Interférences (Belfort, first prize 2000), machinista 2003 (Russia), and has been exhibited among others at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2010, 2011), at Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Paris, 2009), at Sonar (Barcelona, 2002, 2004, 2005), at Ars Electronica (Linz, 2003, 2009), at the CAC of Sienna (Italy, 2004), at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (France, 1997), in Nuits Blanches (Paris 2004, 2008, Amiens 2007, Metz 2009, Bruxelles et Madrid 2010). His work is part of the collections of the Espace Gantner (Bourogne, FR), of the Digitalarti fund (Paris, FR), of the Cube (Issy-Mx, FR) and of the Paris Municipal Contemporary Art Fund (FMAC). Antoine Schmitt is represented by Galerie Charlot.

Kurt d’Haeseleer is the artistic director of the Werktank, a production house for media art in Bierbeek that has its roots in the former artist collective the Filmfabriek. d’Haeseleer himself produced several videos and (interactive) installations, notably Scripted Emotions, Fossilization and S*CKMYP, which were shown in international festivals and shows in Rotterdam, Tokyo, Montreal, Paris, and Berlin.  He also works regularly as a video designer for theatre, dance and opera and makes his own performances. He is the designer for the Ring-cycle in the Scala of Guy Cassiers and has worked with Ictus, Georges Aperghis, Transparant, Kollectif Barakha, Isabella Soupart, Jon Hassell, Annabel Schellekens, Joji Inc, TUK, Peter Verhelst and Köhn.
d’Haeseleer’s work focuses on the visualisation of the dynamic of information. He translates the all-encompassing presence of media into meta-images. Media presence is symbolized by layers of sticky pixel-textures, noise and interactivity. Special effects play an important role in his work, which can best be described as a ‘pixel drama’ or ‘pixel soap’ on the the border zone between painting, video clips, cinema and performance. In his work the special effect is the message.